[dcre]

Can anyone explain why O'Reilly thinks nobody knew until recently that companies are biased toward part-time work in order to avoid providing benefits?

"We can’t see, for example, that the algorithms that manage the workers at McDonald’s or The Gap are optimized toward not giving people full-time work so they don’t have to pay benefits. All that was invisible. It wasn’t until we really started seeing the tech-infused algorithms that people started being critical."

And here's one that's more subtle, so I don't blame him quite as much, but he is naive to think "ideas" are what cause corporations to act the way they do. Material and institutional conditions cause their behavior, which is then justified after the fact by appeal to shareholder value.

"Somebody planted the idea that shareholder value was the right algorithm, the right thing to be optimizing for. But this wasn’t the way companies acted before. We can plant a different idea. That’s what this political process is about."

[pdimitar]

> Can anyone explain why O'Reilly thinks nobody knew until recently that companies are biased toward part-time work in order to avoid providing benefits?

How do you know he's thinking that? The way he was talking, I read him as "well it's obvious that nobody has stopped this behavior so it's fair to assume that not enough people noticed". Wouldn't you agree with that?

> And here's one that's more subtle, so I don't blame him quite as much, but he is naive to think "ideas" are what cause corporations to act the way they do. Material and institutional conditions cause their behavior, which is then justified after the fact by appeal to shareholder value.

That was the only part of the interview where I strongly disagreed with him -- and you're right. It's not about ideas; there are a lot of people out there who are extremely good in bean-counting, micro-management, and of course awful at promoting a positive work environment. They will never change. Only regulators can limit them a bit, if even that.

[JustSomeNobody]

> How do you know he's thinking that? The way he was talking, I read him as "well it's obvious that nobody has stopped this behavior so it's fair to assume that not enough people noticed". Wouldn't you agree with that?

I wouldn't. Anyone... everyone... who's worked retail _knows_ this. Anyone who's worked retail management knows this because when you ask to hire people you're told to hire part timers. Two part timers is always better than a full timer, you're told. This is NOT invisible to anyone. It's simply unspoken.

[sukilot]

> you're told

> you're told

> It's simply unspoken.

[JustSomeNobody]

Not the same thing.

You're told to hire part time. You're not told it's because the company doesn't want to pay them benefits. It's implied, but you're not told.

[ballenf]

>> Can anyone explain why O'Reilly thinks nobody knew until recently that companies are biased toward part-time work in order to avoid providing benefits?

> How do you know he's thinking that?

From the article:

> We had plenty of bias before but we couldn’t see it. We can’t see, for example, that the algorithms that manage the workers at McDonald’s or The Gap are optimized toward not giving people full-time work so they don’t have to pay benefits.

His thinking on the point seems pretty clear and the parent seemed to summarize it pretty well. I had the same question upon reading it and thinking back to the very prominent criticism that companies like Domino's and other fast food operators were taking for cutting workers' hours below the 32-hour max to avoid health care costs.

[pdimitar]

As I said in the other arm of this mini comment thread: I am pretty sure most of the planet knew of the potential for these nasty tactics but the handful of people who could've done something chose to turn blind eye to it because it serves their financial interests and job security plans.

[dcre]

Workers have been agitating against this behavior for many decades, so no, I would not agree that it is fair to assume nobody noticed.

[pdimitar]

Well then. Maybe nobody in power noticed -- or if they did, they turned a blind eye to it.

[munificent]

No, people in power — the CEOs of those companies — did notice. It is a feature, not a bug, from their perspective. It makes the employees cheaper since they don't need to be provided benefits.

I don't see how an automated implementation of the same feature/bug is an improvement over the manual implementation. Either way, it's a deliberate choice that minimizes the value provided to one set of people (low-level employees) and maximizes the value to others (shareholders and executives).

I don't see how using automation and AI to increase the efficiency of transferring money from the poor to the rich is an improvement.

[pdimitar]

Agreed. That's what I was implying -- CEOs want to reduce expenses and eliminate the human error factor, not to make the world better place for workers.

Automation only made these problems easier to increase. Sadly it was almost never used to actually improve people's lives. :(

[dcre]

It's perhaps instructive when people think "people" works as an abbreviation for "people in power".

[pdimitar]

Theoretically, democracy tells us all people should be people in power but we're seeing how well it works in practice, right?